‘I Was a Teenage Internet Junkie’

I should first let you all know that I started off my day with another one of those fruit salads. Oh, yes, I am on the straight path to healthiness.

I chased it with a healthy serving of Sbarro’s baked ziti and two breadsticks … whoops.

I must all confess to you that I’m better talking about not my life in videos but poor at it in blogs. I think I said this earlier, but blogging puts me back in that state in sixth grade where I would spend an hour and just write about how much everything was awful.

This morning, I watched Jason’s VEDA where he talks about all the video games he’s spent his life playing, and then, for the thousandth time in the past nine months, I asked myself, “What did I do with all of my time as a child?!”

I can walk you all through a typical week of my life, and maybe someone can figure out where my expertise of ANYTHING comes into play.

I went to school every morning, stayed for Team-Up in the afternoons and then went to swim practice. That was my life. I got home from swim practice around 8 p.m. from my middle school years until junior year of high school, and then I played around on the Internet … a lot.

That said, while others gained knowledge of sports facts or video games, I, no doubt, taught myself a bit of HTML and a lot of Harry Potter trivia. I think I’ve sadly forgotten most of the things I discovered while perusing for hours on end on the Harry Potter Lexicon, and shouldn’t something you spent a long time to which you devoted your time stick with you forever?

I think this is the product of the losing days, like I said before, in which I replaced the Harry Potter Lexicon with things like Xanga and eventually MySpace.

(As a side note, I’m proud to announce I only caught the MySpace bug for not even a full 12 months … because Facebook stepped in.)

Maybe in the time my peers spent flipping through magazines or learning sports figures or obsessing over fashion techniques or spending hours on video games, I … was an Internet addict.

Should I make that the title of my inevitable memoir? “I Was a Teenage Internet Junkie.”

Bestseller, mumkin?

As a teenage Internet junkie, I really did spend a lot of time online and learning how to use the different websites. During my Spring Break in freshman year of high school, I spent so many hours listening to music on YouTube, researching any and everything on Wikipedia and familiarizing myself with slang on Urban Dictionary.

I think what attracted me back to the Internet always was the holy Buddy List. I think I was a slave to buddy lists, and it was actually a large change in lifestyle last year and for the latter part of high school where I didn’t rely on AIM or Skype for leisure time.

Still, I feel like my Internet hobby didn’t gain me as much as expertise as my peers have in their respective misspent youth interests. I know not that much about the HP books anymore, since I’ve been away from reading them in their entirety for a while — maybe I can get around to that this summer — and I never expanded my HTML knowledge, so I’ve forgotten most of it, and it wasn’t even that vast at the start!

Ah, well, I think now, I can consider myself an interesting person. I watch a lot of TV shows only the people of Tumblr like, and YouTube is just a subculture within itself that I think I have a stable ground on what goes on there. I mean, I’m sure I’ve spent as many hours on that website than gamers have spent on their games.

It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve seen so many videos from a wide array of users, and I watch way more people than to whom I’m actually subscribed. While I’m not well-versed in all the trivia that happened before I joined, I definitely know everything that’s happened since.

So, while everyone else was watching every single football game on a Sunday, I was catching up with MuggleCast and PotterCast. And while others were melted to their MMOs, I was refreshing myself with the language behind a certain character’s death.

And, if I ever encounter someone who’s well-versed in just about everything, I’m sure I’ll just stand proud and say, “Well, I had too much homework to fit in time for everything.”